China Briefing | China’s power crunch is being fuelled by a ‘simple and brutal’ approach to climate change targets
- Supply and demand issues and electricity price caps are only partly to blame for the blackouts making a mockery of the government’s vaunted people-centred approach
- A bigger problem is that bureaucrats, having ignored emission targets for months, are now scrambling to catch up and are employing the time-honoured, but destructive method of ‘Jiandan Cubao’
The Chinese phrase of Jiandan Cubao, which literally means “simple and brutal”, is something people should bear in mind if they want to understand China’s policymaking process, and why policies are executed in ways that rather than cure a headache are bound to make it bigger.
But for bureaucrats, old habits die hard. When pushing for an unpleasant policy change, or facing an emergency, they still frequently resort to the “simple and brutal” approach to attain the end goal of the policy and damn the consequences.
The latest example is the power crunch that in recent days has swept much of the eastern part of China, home to the bulk of the country’s population and manufacturing, from Heilongjiang province in the northeast down to the province of Guangdong. Judging from media reports, blackouts have seriously disrupted not only businesses but people’s lives. All this makes a mockery of the people-centred approach promoted daily in the official media.
In several northeastern cities, power cuts have occurred without pre-warning or any indication of how long the blackouts would last. There have been reports of residents being trapped in elevators in high-rise buildings, traffic lights going out, and water companies warning users to store water and prepare for rolling cuts in supply over the coming months. In some cities and rural areas, candles have sold out with residents forced temporally to live in darkness while mobile phones and computers have gone blank.
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Power crisis in China leaves highway in the dark
Businesses are also badly affected. In the economic powerhouse of Guangdong, manufacturing companies in certain cities have been ordered to operate three days on, four days off, on a weekly basis and in some extreme cases, they are allowed to operate only one day a week.